


At the Beginning

by CastleriggCircle (BanjoOnMyKnee)



Series: At the Beginning AU [1]
Category: Sleepy Hollow (TV)
Genre: Episode Tag, F/M, Season/Series 01
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-05
Updated: 2016-02-05
Packaged: 2018-05-18 07:39:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,124
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5907184
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BanjoOnMyKnee/pseuds/CastleriggCircle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>So, in my impatience with the slow-burn to no-burn happening on the actual show, I decided to experiment with just HOW EARLY in the run of the show I could make Ichabbie happen. Here's my attempt at right after Season 1, Episode 1!</p>
            </blockquote>





	At the Beginning

“It’s nothing fancy,” Abbie said as she pulled into the motel parking lot, “but it’s a place to stay. Should be better than a mental hospital or a jail cell, anyway.”

He…Crane…her new friend/partner/whatever he was… Her _time traveler_ (by now she was somewhere north of 90% sure he was exactly what he claimed)… Her partner in headless-monster fighting and apocalypse averting stared at the building with the intense concentration she was beginning to realize was a front for bewilderment. For a guy that smart, being constantly confused by everything in his surroundings had to be beyond frustrating. 

“I’ve no doubt it will be,” he said, “and I’ve stayed in many a rude hostelry in my lifetime. While I would not wish it for a permanent abode…”

She hurried to soothe the anxiety lurking behind his deep voice and posh accent. “Don’t worry. It won’t be.”

“Hm. What sort of home does 2013 have to offer a man with neither friends, family, nor funds?”

His hands twitched, and Abbie gave him a sympathetic half-smile. From his perspective, he’d pretty much gone to sleep with all those things taken for granted and woken up flat broke and utterly alone. She’d survived more than her share of loss and loneliness, but nothing as abrupt as that. 

She eased the car into a parking space near the office as she considered her answer. “Normally? It doesn’t.” Might as well be honest about all the problems twenty-first century Americans hadn’t managed to solve. “But don’t worry, I’m not going to see you sleeping on the streets. We’ll come up with something.” And they would. Hell, she’d give him her spare bedroom if it came to that, though she wasn’t quite ready to verbalize that offer. He’d be the weirdest roommate ever, and how would she keep any kind of boundaries or privacy, with someone like him underfoot?

 _Cross that bridge when you come to it,_ she told herself. “But in the meantime,” she continued, “you’re a witness in a murder investigation. So your interest in having a roof over your head coincides with ours in keeping you in town.”

“How fortuitous for us all.” He managed to unbuckle his seatbelt and get out of the car almost as if he’d been doing it his whole life. A fast learner, this one. She couldn’t help liking him, time displacement and/or utter insanity notwithstanding. (And really, she was up to at least 95% believing in the time displacement theory now. It made more sense, with all she’d seen and done the past few days. Which was its own kind of insanity.) She could relate to that sarcastic edge, that need to prove himself sane and strong in a hostile and confusing world. And after losing Corbin, having Crane on her hands was a welcome distraction, keeping her moving when she’d otherwise be paralyzed with grief. Not that she wanted to forget, ever, or shove aside the grief her mentor was owed. But Abbie couldn’t let herself be paralyzed. Having to be strong for someone made it so much easier to hold herself together.

He hung back a little, somehow managing to be a comfortably looming presence as she checked him into the motel on the department’s dime. As she went through the routine-for-her process of paying the deposit and accepting the key cards, she watched him out of the corner of her eye. He’d been the same way when they stopped for burgers just before coming here, studying her routine actions and listening to her everyday words with a kind of intent desperation. Trying to figure out how to navigate the ordinary world. Now that she thought about it, acting exactly like she would if she woke up a couple centuries from now on a space station or something.

 _Ninety-nine percent,_ she decided as she slid her work credit card back into her wallet and led him toward the door. If he wasn’t what he claimed to be, she was pretty sure she would’ve caught him being too familiar with something invented between 1781 and 2013 by now.

The room turned out to be more than a little grim, and looked like it had last been redecorated sometime in the Reagan administration. Still, she’d seen worse. Hell, she’d slept in worse. “At least it’s clean,” she said to break the silence as Crane took a few cautious steps inside. “And the parking lot is nearly empty, so it should be quiet.”

He turned to face her and inclined his head in a sort of quarter-bow. “Do not think me ungrateful, Lieutenant. I am simply…overwhelmed, and so very weary.”

Of course he was. She let the door close behind her and turned on the nearest lamp. She should probably give him a quick tour, show him what to do with the lights and plumbing and so on. What would she need someone to tell her, on that space station in 2253? “Completely understandable,” she said. “Let me just show you how things work.” Where to even start? “Actually, I was thinking I should get you some books—like, maybe find an American history textbook or something to get you caught up on the past couple centuries. That can probably wait till tomorrow, though.”

“Certainly,” Crane said. “You are more than generous, and you must surely need your rest as well.”

She did, but she wasn’t in any hurry to go home. When she was alone, she’d have to face up to everything that happened. “Yeah,” she agreed. “One day at a time. One thing at a time. Speaking of which, come here.” She beckoned him to join her at the bedside table. “I’m sure you’ve noticed light switches by now.” He nodded. “This one has a chain instead.” She demonstrated, turning it off and on. “Your turn.”

His hand brushed hers as he reached for the chain, and really, he had such ridiculously good hands, with those long, graceful fingers. That…that awareness that had been humming between them since practically the moment they met sparked into full-blown attraction, just like that, and she failed to hide the frisson of it. When she looked up at him, she saw an answering hunger in his eyes, pupils gone big and dark against the pale blue irises.

She couldn’t even tell who moved first, but suddenly her hand was clasped in his, she leaned up on tiptoe as he bent down, and their lips met.

***

Almost before he knew how it happened, Crane found himself kissing Lieutenant Mills. It hadn’t been a matter of conscious intent—they were so newly acquainted, this future world he’d suddenly found himself in was so odd, he mourned a wife whom he had seen alive and well only days ago as he counted the time—but now that it had begun, the last thing he wished to do was stop. Kissing had not changed during his long slumber, thank God, and the lieutenant’s mouth opened beneath his as her arms slid up around his neck and he settled his hands at her hips.

Despite all the complications and confusion of his present life, somehow it felt utterly right to hold her, as if they were a lock and key carefully crafted to fit together. Yet the logistics of it, with her so petite, surely they would both be more comfortable…and he nudged her toward the bed, so conveniently near, without so much as pausing to consider the impropriety of it.

She hummed agreement and pulled him along with her until they toppled together onto the mattress—a noisy contraption that managed to be simultaneously springy and sagging—still kissing hungrily. Ah, yes, this was much better, lying together, the luxuriant press of body against body. He broke from her mouth to trail kisses down her neck, and he moaned low in his throat as her fingertips dug into his shoulders and she slid a leg against his side.

He tongued the indentation of her collarbone, then bent yet lower, to the soft expanse of smooth skin exposed above her soft, clinging shirt, but she stiffened and took his head between her hands, stilling him. “Hold up, hold up,” she said.

That bit of modern vernacular was no challenge to translate. He lifted his head and was ready to spring to his feet and offer apologies, but instead she drew him up till they lay face to face again. “I’m not normally the type who goes to bed with a man I barely know,” she said.

He felt his face heat and tried to draw away again. “Of course you are not. I never imagined—I do beg your pardon…”

She curled a hand into his shirt front. “If I make an exception just this once, will you still respect me in the morning? I know a woman in your time wouldn’t at all unless she was married, but it’s different now, and—”

There was a great deal she didn’t know about women in his time, but he was of no mind to provide a detailed explication at that moment. “I will,” he said instead. “I swear it. I’m hardly accustomed to bedding women I’ve only just met, either, but…” He found himself uncharacteristically at a loss for words as he sought some explanation for the rightness, the importance, of the two of them together.

She stroked his hair, then rested her hand against his cheek. “I think we both need to prove we’re still alive right now.”

“Yes,” he agreed. And that was certainly a part of it. As to the rest…perhaps the least said of it the better, at least for now, in case this turned out to be a momentary madness which one or both of them regretted on the morrow.

“Then as long as that’s settled…” She drew him down for another kiss, long and leisurely yet not remotely chaste—she rubbed her thigh against his cock with expert intent, he palmed her ripe, full breasts as she arched into his hands. He kissed his way down her throat to her collarbone again and paused, considering her unfamiliar attire.

Seeming to divine his somewhat bewildered intent, she twisted free enough to sit up, discard her leather coat, and pull her shirt over her head. Where a woman of his time would have worn a chemise and corset under her outer clothing, she had only a small black garment he had no name for, but that had clearly been designed to shield and support the bosom.

“Pretty simple, really,” she said. “At least, those dresses women wore back in your day look a lot harder to get out of.”

“Oh, they were,” he assured her. “So much so that if a couple wished to indulge in a daytime tryst, they did not remove their clothing, but merely loosened or moved aside the critical parts.”

“Well, sometimes that still happens, but when you have a bed and no risk of an interruption…” 

She reached for him and he followed suit, running curious fingertips along the margins of her undergarment. “What is this called?” he asked.

She grinned. “A bra. Short for brassiere, but no one ever uses the whole name.”

 _“Bra,”_ he repeated. Its fabric was too thin to disguise the taut peaks of her nipples, and he danced his fingertips over one and gave it a gentle pinch, earning him a pleased gasp. “How is it removed?” he asked. 

Now she chuckled low in her throat. “There are hooks at the back. But we’re getting a bit out of balance, don’t you think?” She pushed at his coat, and he obligingly removed it, setting it gently on the floor rather than tossing it aside with abandon as she had her own attire moments ago. He hadn’t anything else to wear, and while he supposed he would eventually be forced to resort to modern attire, he wanted to keep that coat, that tie to who and what he had been before, for as long as he could. 

Before he could begin his search for the _bra’s_ hooks, she tugged insistently at his shirt, and he drew it over his head with her assistance. There was a new tenderness in her eyes as she looked at him, and she leaned forward to press her lips against…that great ugly new-old scar where the Horseman had struck him down. Days ago. Centuries ago.

He flinched away, and she frowned surprise and concern. “That thing—I do not recognize…it doesn’t seem a part of me yet.”

His words sounded foolish to his own ears, but she nodded sagely. “Ah.” She leaned up to kiss him and stroked her hands over his chest and shoulders, tracing the lines of muscle and bone and teasing at his nipples with her thumbs, but paying no special attention to that strange scar. Much better.

Now he found the hooks that fastened her bra and after a moment’s experimentation worked out how to undo them. Some small part of his mind retained its curiosity about this new world, the two centuries and more of inventions and improvements he had slumbered through. That part observed the inherent tension and elasticity of the garment’s straps, unlike any fabric he had encountered, and marked it out as yet another item he must learn about.

But the greater part of his mind and his entire body wanted only to explore the woman in his arms. “So beautiful,” he told her, and so she was, a veritable pocket Venus, petite yet oh so lushly curved. “Intoxicating,” he murmured as he bent to give those ripe breasts the attention they so richly deserved.

She clearly wasn’t as given to speech as such times as he was— _or at any time,_ a wry inner voice commented. No one, friend or enemy, had ever called Ichabod Crane taciturn or laconic. And yet he knew he pleased her, could read the signs of it in her heavy-lidded eyes as she gazed upon him, the way she caressed him, her hands exploring and seeking to possess, and the way she all but purred under his touch. The arch of her back, the tug of her hands at his hair, the embrace of her legs encircling his hips…intoxicating was too weak a word.

He undid the button at the top of her trousers easily enough—buttons, at least, still functioned just as they had in the eighteenth century—but he wasn’t sure what to make of the ridge of metal beneath it.

“Zipper,” she said, rather breathlessly. “Just take the little tab at the top and pull down.”

He followed her instructions. “Ah. How simple, yet ingenious.” 

With a light laugh, she arched her hips to allow him to tug away her trousers. “I believe you’ll find the modern world full of such wonders.”

“So it would seem,” he agreed as he set the trousers aside and turned his attention to the removing the scant scrap of black cotton she wore for drawers, inhaling deeply of her scent. “But just now I find myself drawn to…more timeless wonders.” 

He knelt between her legs and bent to taste her, but she seized him by the hair again and tugged him insistently upward. “Too soon for that,” she said, anxiety warring with the desire in her great dark eyes.

Crane was disappointed—he’d wanted to taste her, to dedicate himself to her pleasure—but he understood, too. The act in question _was_ somehow more intimate than sexual congress itself. So he kissed her in reassurance and acceptance. When she settled into his arms with a pleased hum, he ran a hand down her body to rest gently at the apex of her thighs. “Is it too soon for this?”

Now her eyes sparkled with both lust and merriment. “Oh, hell no.”

She shifted beneath him, arching her back and opening her legs, and he watched her face as he explored her wet heat until he found just the right angle, two fingers inside her and his thumb circling her bud, that drew her to thrust her hips off the bed to meet his hand, her head thrown back, her breath coming in whimpering pants, one hand curled into the sheets, the other tugging at his hair. 

And then she came apart with a sharp cry, her face contorted with pleasure, her inner muscles rippling against his fingers. So exquisitely beautiful.

She clung to him as she caught her breath. “Wow. Oh my God.”

“Good?” he asked.

“Better than good.” She gave him a swift kiss, hitching her hip against his rock-hard cock, then twisted away to rummage among her belongings beside the bed. To his inarticulate noise of protest, she said, “Don’t worry. We’re not done here. Just need to get…aha!” She sat up in triumph, holding aloft a tiny square packet or envelope in some pale blue material he didn’t recognize.

Before he could question this inexplicable behavior, she pushed him onto his back, knelt astride him, and went to work on his trouser buttons. “Talk about challenging clothing,” she muttered. “Just how many buttons do these things have?” But she found them all quite readily, and he helped her push the trousers off until he lay as bare as she.

She returned her attention to the blue packet and tore it open, taking out a small disk. “Condom,” she said in response to his puzzled frown. “Did they have those in your time?”

“Not like that.” The object she held could not possibly be constructed of sheep’s intestine, nor did it have a thin ribbon at its base to tie it into place.

“Well, no, you wouldn’t have had latex.”

 _Latex._ That part of his brain that almost never stopped thinking, not even when a beautiful woman was stroking his cock, was bewildered at the sheer number of new substances that had been invented since his time—surely a man of the fifteenth century brought to the eighteenth would have found less to baffle him, for at least any new tool or object would have been constructed of familiar wood, stone, metal, or cloth.

“Count it as another modern marvel,” she continued, now rolling the condom onto his cock with careful, caressing hands. “A nice, simple way to prevent pregnancy.”

He nodded. The _latex_ felt strange, but her hands felt just right, and it would certainly be disastrous for her to fall pregnant in the midst of this apocalypse they had been chosen to fight—though he had doubts of his own abilities in that regard, since Katrina had never done so—and then his busy mind truly did shut down as at last she took him inside her. And, oh God, the rightness of their joining, the sense of completion…

She rode him fast and hard. He had always enjoyed this position—the dragon upon Saint George, some called it—for the opportunity it gave to appreciate the beauty of a woman, to fill his hands with the voluptuous curves of breast and arse. Yet he wanted to be with her, not merely under her, and so he drew her forward until they could kiss, open-mouthed and without any great art, but entirely delicious. The double joining him brought him closer to the edge, and soon he spent in the most intense orgasm he had ever known.

Afterward he stroked and caressed her until she too reached the pinnacle of pleasure, then gathered her in his arms, close to his heart, her dark hair hiding his strange scar. He was blissfully content, but utterly at a loss for words.

She brushed her lips against his skin. “It’s OK,” she said. “We’re good.”

Such a strange and oddly ubiquitous word, this _OK._ In Crane’s day it had not existed, but already he had noticed that the people of this century could hardly speak without it, using it for a variety of affirmations and even as a sort of spoken punctuation. In this case it seemed to mean that he should not worry, that she did not regret their actions, and he nodded and stroked her hair. This moment was by far the most comfortable and peaceful he’d known since awakening in this strange new time. 

“I should go, though.”

He’d been rather hoping she’d stay—he thought he’d sleep the better for having her in his arms—but he loosened his grip as soon as she began to edge away.

“They’ll be sending another cop in about half an hour, you see, to stand guard outside your room.”

“Lest I escape?” Surely they believed by now that he had neither another place to return to nor a desire to leave.

She sat up and began gathering her clothing. “You’re not a prisoner—it’s more in case the Horseman returns. Not that having one guard would be much help, but since it’s not like they’re going to admit what’s really happening…”

“Appearances must be maintained.” He understood now how it would look for her, if this other police officer arrived and found her in his bed.

“Exactly. I’ll be back in the morning, though.” Now dressed in her undergarments, she leaned over him for a quick kiss.

“I know.”

He watched her dress, but found himself drifting toward sleep as he listened to her speak on her communication device— _phone,_ that was the world. “Yeah, got him all checked in…he’s doing fine…I know, but…a cooperative witness…”

He hoped their cooperation would continue to bear fruit.

***

Well. That had been…unexpected. In more ways than one. Even when she’d decided that yes, she was going to do the reckless thing and have sex with her time traveler, she hadn’t expected it to end with her all languid and multi-orgasmically sated. If she’d stopped to think about the sexual prowess of 18th-century men at all—which she hadn’t, since it’s not like she’d ever expected it to be relevant to her life—she wouldn’t have pegged them as knowing their way around a woman’s body and eager to put said knowledge into practice. She’d been thrilled to be proven wrong, but a little dismayed, too. That had been sudden. That had been _intense._

Yet by the time she was fully dressed, he was fast asleep. Abbie huffed out a silent laugh. Nice to know that in some ways Crane was a typical male. She thought about waking him up—she still needed to do what she’d intended when she came in with him in the first place, and show him how to work the room’s technology. But the poor guy was so exhausted…not to mention so distractingly naked. She gently drew the sheet and blanket up to his shoulders, and he barely stirred, just enough to sink deeper into the center of the saggy mattress and let out a snore.

She shook her head, then in a moment of inspiration remembered that she had a pack of post-its and a sharpie in her purse, left over from labeling boxes last weekend when she’d helped a friend pack to move across town. Working quickly, she tiptoed around the room, labeling everything that might look unfamiliar to someone Not From Around Now.

She needed this distraction from her…distraction. She’d had _I can’t believe we actually survived that_ sex before—with Luke, before they’d _dated_ -dated, and before him with another cop friend-with-benefits who’d eventually married his childhood sweetheart and put such benefits off limits. But those times had always been fast, hard fucks to scratch an urgent, vital itch, not so much about intimacy as a sweaty scramble for a pair of nice, life-affirming orgasms. Take-and-take.

This thing with Crane had been give-and-give. Once he’d promised he’d respect her she’d let down almost all her guard, sensing that he needed a chance to show himself competent and in control…and in return he’d turned that relentless focus of his onto pleasing her. It had been tender. It had been connected. And God help her, but it had left her wanting to curl into bed beside him, sleep all through the night spooned against his lanky warmth, and wake up to give him a hands-on introduction to modern showers. If they were truly God’s chosen Witnesses to stand against the Apocalypse, was this really how they were supposed to connect? And how were they supposed to keep their hands off each other, now that they knew this?

Still, before she slipped out of the room, she paused to smooth Crane’s hair back from his face and press a soft kiss against his temple. They were in this together. Whatever _this_ turned out to be.


End file.
